Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on  February 28, 2017

The goal of this document is to share our findings regarding the event, specify the root cause analysis, outline actions to be taken to solve the downtime event, as well as preventive measures Ex Libris is taking to avoid similar cases in future.

Event Timeline

Intermediate service interruptions were experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma instances at our European Data Center during the following time period: February 28, 2017 from 10:18am until 10:56am Amsterdam time zone.

Event was identified by the 24x7 monitoring. During the event, the service was slow at times and experienced intermediate short periods of unavailability (total 12 minutes of downtime was recorded by our 24x7 monitoring).

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:

We experienced a network device failure on our backbone infrastructure.

The outage was due to hardware problem that caused interruptions to production traffic flow in our datacenter network – due to the short intermediate interruptions (2-3 minutes), full failover process to redundant devices was not initiated.

To resolve the issue Ex Libris engineers worked with the vendor support to replace the device.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:

Ex Libris engineers are working with the vendor support to identify possible issues, and identify preventive monitoring.

Customer Communication

ExLibris is committed to providing customers with prompt and ongoing updates during Cloud events. Ongoing and prompt updates on service interruptions appear in the system status portal at this address: http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/

These updates are automatically sent as emails to registered customers.

Publication History